Hats, Headpieces and Fascinators

This is a wordpress development based on Wayne Connor's sliding door theme to present the bounty of hats and headpieces hand-crafted by Marie Hill Millinery in Lockerbie, Scotland.

Wordpress has recently won awards in 2009 for open source CMS so is pushing old favourites Joomla and Drupal around a bit. The power and simplicity of the wordpress model along with the huge and diverse support network of users and developers make it very flexible and robust with each new version release.

We've taken the wordpress install and customised it to suit the gallery image layout requirements of the client, and tailored the sliding door images to suit the millinery related content.

Edinburgh apartment to let

The estate managers at Galloway House Estate are now providing accommodation in Edinburgh near Stockbridge and the Royal Botanic Gardens.

Callisti assisted with some airbrushing (removing scaffolding and estate agency signs) and annexed the page to the existing site. It's usually advisable to categorise your content under a relevant URL but this is a way of testing the visitor response.

Some other updates throughout the website mean some minor glitches have been sorted e.g. the old Set rs = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection") , rs.CursorLocation = adUseClient; previously there were errors when attempting to update some fields in the management section.

Also the design layout was being compromised on certain pages due to the table (tables!) widths and image thumbnails, but this has been resolved.

Who's gonna drive you home?

More website transfer action at the weekend means that Callisti now unexpectedly hosts 3 limo websites for Dumfries and Galloway and the Cumbria area.

The Carlisle Pink Hummer has been on the books for a year so the Dumfries Limo and Excalibur Limousine websites effectively make a limo portfolio.

Re: Arthur Pendragon - sometimes you don't have to pull swords from stones, so much as catch them when they fall out.

Scottish Castles

We've now completed working through re-instating hosting provision after being dealt a hand of satellite sites for Comlongon Castle.

Due to the different angles of interest - historic, romantic, panoramic - there are a number of targeted domain names around variations on the Comlongon Castle theme.

Weighing up the balance of SEO costs and benefits will be an ongoing task.

Keeping the outdoor spirit alive

Patties of Dumfries is one of Dumfries and Galloway's established outdoor shops and provides brand name outdoor wear and kit. A timely transfer for Callisti given the recent and impending weather!

We will be working with the team at Patties to develop an effective ecommerce solution for a select range of outdoor wear. News to follow...

Caveat Emptor

This lesson is so old the latin has stuck around.

In other words, once you've been sold something, what you thought you'd bought isn't what you actually got - and there's no recourse to the seller.

Callisti thinks this is pretty harsh so takes a more accountable approach to business, after all, the phrase might still be in use but the roman empire collapsed a few thousand moons ago...

Blog revamp for wishlist news

As a mini-project a few hours were spent playing with the mr moto template on blogger to recreate the likeness of the mywishwand website. Hitherto the blog looked very unbranded but now the style is inkeeping with the generic site design and the mywishwand twitter style.

Some useful tips to get you started on this sort of exercise can be found on various affiliate marketing type sites...

There are also tips here for adding google analytics and various pimp-my-blog techniques.

We are underused #2

Callisti gives big thanks to all those who have helped with the migration of websites and email accounts to our hosting services over the past few months.

It's a time consuming job and requires a deal of knowledge, experience and learning to make sure the end-client has an uninterrupted service.

For anyone who feels their technical support job is towards the browner end of the stick be assured that your work is invaluable...

Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival

Callisti is pleased to finally complete the transfer of the DG Arts Festival website and start to manage and maintain the South of Scotland events site.

Lately it's been like running a web removal service; instead of people's possessions being transported from old house to new, it's transferring the hosting service of organisations' websites to a new server. It can be just as stressful!

Comlongon Castle

Having worked on SEO for Comlongon Castle some years ago it's great to get back together with the team to provide a website hosting and management service.

Rather than change for change sake, Callisti aims to streamline the existing web presence and improve the online services for the prestigious Scottish wedding venue. It's a distinctive venue, and with the addition of the new honeymoon lodge, built in a style in-keeping with the historic castle, there are good prospects ahead.

If you're looking for a romantic wedding in a Scottish castle this is well worth checking out.

Allan McNish

Callisti has teamed up with CSS Stellar to provide the web presence for Allan McNish. This is an informative, subscription based website for fans and followers of the successful racing driver who hails from Dumfries and Galloway.

There are some bespoke systems in place on the website which were developed by Peter Graves, a development luminary who Callisti has worked with on several projects to date.

Sledges Upgraded

On 9th September 2009, Joe Brinkman from DotNetNuke Corporation announced that the DotNetNuke 4.x product line had officially reached its End-Of-Life.

The DotNetNuke Corporation is no longer providing support or patches for the 4.x product line, but PowerDNN have assisted Callisti in the upgrade of sledges.co.uk from v4.8.4 to the more stable v4.9.5, and will continue to provide their high level of support.

Callisti will be looking at moving to v5.x next year but will have to check for potential issues with the legacy version on ASPDotNetStoreFront currently employed by the sledges website.